by Lisa Hilton
The pageantry of Elizabeth of York’s coronation was in keeping with the aim of minimising the significance of her personal claim. Henry had made a ceremonial entry into the city some days before, watched in secret by Elizabeth and his mother, so that when she made her formal arrival by barge from Greenwich (itself a departure from custom), he was able to welcome her to the city almost as though she were a foreign bride. Elizabeth was attended by her motherin-law, Margaret Beaufort, rather than any of her own family, and there was a notable absence of Yorkist badges and decorations. One feature did signal a connection with Edward IV: a model of a huge, red, fire-breathing dragon, the symbol of the last of the ancient British kings, Cadwaladr. Contemporary genealogies show that Edward IV had been interested in proving his descent through the Mortimers from Cadwaladr who, in legend, was visited by an angel who told him that only the true King of Britain would one day recover the realm. Henry VII co-opted even this idea, also claiming descent from Cadwaladr and decorating the horse of Elizabeth’s champion at her coronation banquet -Jasper Tudor, now promoted Duke of Bedford — with red dragons. In accordance with the practice of Catherine de Valois’s coronation, Henry was not present for Elizabeth’s crowning or her banquet, surveying both from behind a latticed screen draped with cloth of arras. In this concealment he was reinforcing her status by melding his public body with hers at the moment of translation, even though his choice of timing for her coronation struck a blow at queenly authority. In the fourteenth century, it had been considered essential to crown Philippa of Hainault before she gave birth to the heir to the throne. By delaying Elizabeth’s ceremony until a year after Arthur’s arrival, Henry undid nearly 500 years-worth of accumulated customary power. With the exception of Marguerite of France, whose husband already had an heir, and Anne Neville, whose queenship had not been foreseen, Elizabeth was the only English queen since 1066 to give birth to the King’s child without first being crowned. It was marriage to him, he emphasised, that legitimated his heir, and that alone.
The continuation of the papal declaration of 1486 had affirmed that it was Henry’s blood, and only Henry’s, that could transmit a claim: If it please God that the said Elizabeth … should decease without issue between our sovereign lord and her of their bodies born than such issue as between him and her whom after God shall join him to shall be had and born heritors to the same crown and realm of England.’2
The aggrandisement of the Tudor line also extended to twitching at the details of the past. Henry had the headstone of Catherine de Valois’s tomb replaced with one that mentioned her second marriage, to Owen Tudor, a gesture which retroactively endorsed his own family claim to royal blood. Officially, then, the Yorkist entitlement had died with the princes in the Tower. But suspicion and paranoia was to haunt the succession of Elizabeth’s descendants for the duration of her husband’s dynasty.
A week after Henry VII’s coronation on 7 November 1485, an act of Parliament repealed the statute of invalidity against his motherin-law’s marriage and restored the Queen Dowager to her full status. Elizabeth Woodville attended her daughter’s wedding, after which Henry confirmed her dower rights. The royal women then moved to Winchester for the spring while the King was on progress, and Elizabeth Woodville stood godmother at Prince Arthur’s christening at the cathedral, which was also attended by her daughters Anne and Cecily, Edward Woodville and the Marchioness of Dorset. For once the Woodvilles had no need to feel like parvenus, for the new King’s pedigree was more dubious than their own. Finally, after all her struggles, it seemed that Elizabeth Woodville was safe. Yet just a few months later, in February 1487, the royal council assembled to deprive Elizabeth of ‘all her possessions. This was done because she had made her peace with King Richard, had placed her daughters at his disposal and had, by leaving sanctuary, broken her promise to those … who had, at her own most urgent entreaty, forsaken their own English property and fled to Henry in Brittany.’3 On 20 February Parliament granted her 400-mark annuity and she was registered as a boarder at Bermondsey Abbey. The Benedictine convent of Bermondsey was a sister house of the Cluniac foundation of 1082. Since the Cluniacs looked to William, first Duke of Aquitaine, as their tenth-century founder, Elizabeth, as the widow of one of the Duke’s descendants, was entitled to a special offer of free board and lodging.
Officially, Elizabeth Woodville had voluntarily surrendered her lands and decided to follow the tradition of widowed queens by retiring to the contemplative life. But if this was truly the case, why would the partisan Vergil put out a report that reflected so badly on Henry? Francis Bacon’s suggestion was that Elizabeth thought her daughter disparaged by the marriage to Henry ‘not advanced, but depressed’, and that she had therefore collaborated in the Simnel plot. One of the more absurd conclusions of at least one of Elizabeth’s biographers is that ‘it seems certain that she was actively working for Henry’s overthrow’.4 In February 1487, when Henry showed the true Earl of Warwick in the streets of London, he was clearly concerned about rumours of an invasion, but why would Elizabeth have involved herself in such a conspiracy? She had worked for her daughter’s marriage, if not actually suggested it. Warwick was the son of her erstwhile enemy Clarence, the son, moreover, of Anne Neville’s sister, and Anne’s husband had murdered her sons. Elizabeth was far too seasoned in political intrigue to have believed in Simnel. There is strong evidence that Henry never seriously doubted her loyalty, either. Edward Woodville commanded 2,000 troops in Henry’s van at the battle of Stoke (this factor is evaded by the suggestion that Elizabeth was acting alone), but why would Henry have proposed a third marriage to Elizabeth, as he did as part of the three-year Scottish truce signed in 1486, if he believed her intention was to overthrow him, and thereby her own daughter?
If the question of treason is dismissed, we are left with the theory that Elizabeth had deliberately impoverished herself and withdrawn from court at the very point of her daughter’s triumph. Apologists for this explanation have claimed that Elizabeth’s dower lands were in the right of the reigning queen, which is not only inaccurate but implausible, given that Henry had handed over the lands himself, and that Elizabeth was ill, of which there is no record whatsoever. The fact that Henry officially remained on good terms with his motherin-law, suggesting her as a bride for James III, referring to her affectionately in official documents as ‘our right dear and right well beloved Queen Elizabeth, mother of our dear wife the Queen’, inviting her to court and making occasional grants such as fifty marks in 1490 for Christmas, does not necessarily indicate that Elizabeth’s decision to live at Bermondsey was her own, merely that Henry knew any public appearance of disunity would be damaging to the royal family. He could keep Elizabeth at arm’s length by inviting her to attend court in the full knowledge that he had made her too embarrassingly poor to do so.
Elizabeth was not even permitted to attend the 1487 coronation. Jealousy of Margaret Beaufort would hardly have kept her away. Her presence would have been an all-too-visible reminder of the past, and of the fact that Elizabeth of York was far closer by right to the throne than her husband. Even Elizabeth Woodville’s champions have too easily accepted the theory that her retreat to Bermondsey was an elective choice to follow tradition of pious queenship, when all the evidence suggests that she, like Joanna of Navarre, was simply inconveniently rich. Henry wanted her dower and he shut her up in the convent to get it. Given what Elizabeth Woodville had endured, Henry’s treatment of her was appalling, and it does not reflect well on Elizabeth of York that she apparently acquiesced so passively in his plans.
The last five years of Elizabeth Woodville’s life were spent at Bermondsey. She did attend her daughter’s next lying-in at Westminster in 1489, but aside from this her only notable excursion was in response to an invitation to meet the French ambassadors and her kinsman Francois of Luxembourg in November the same year. In April 1492, Elizabeth made her will:
I Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, late wife to the most victorious
Prince of blessed memory Edward the Fourth, being of whole mind, seeing the world so transitory and no creature certain when they shall depart from hence, having God Almighty fresh in mind … bequeath my soul into his hands … I bequeath my body to be buried with the body of my said Lord at Windsor according to the will of my said Lord and mine, without pompous interring of costly expenses thereabout. Item, where I have no worldly goods to do the Queen’s Grace, my dearest daughter, a pleasure with, neither to reward any of my children according to my heart and mind, I beseech Almighty God to bless her Grace with all her noble issue and wish as good heart and mind as is to me possible. I give her Grace my blessing and all the foresaid my children. Item, I will that such small stuff and goods that I have to be disposed truly in the account of my debts and for the health of my soul as far as they will extend. Item, if any of my blood will of my stuff or goods to me pertaining, I will that they have the preferment before any other.5
It is a heartbreakingly pathetic document for anyone to leave, let alone a woman who had been a reigning queen consort. Two years later, Elizabeth died at Bermondsey on 8 June. On the tenth, the twenty-seventh anniversary of her coronation, her body was transported by boat to Windsor, accompanied by her friends Dr Brent and Prior Ingilby, the executors of her will. Also in attendance were two ‘gentlewomen’, one of whom was Grace, the illegitimate daughter of Edward IV. Only one priest and a clerk waited to receive the cof fin. Two days later Dorset, princesses Anne, Katherine and Bridget and Edmund de la Pole arrived to hear a funeral service conducted by the bishop of Rochester. A clerk who witnessed the ceremony left a concerned account. ‘There was nothing done solemnly for her saving a low hearse such as they use for the common people with wooden candlesticks about it … never a new torch, but old torches, nor poor men in black gowns nor hoods but upon a dozen old men holding torches and torches ends.’6 The was not customary for the King to attend funerals, and the Queen was about to give birth, but neither were the senior magnates represented and the dean of Windsor, though in attendance, took no part in the service. No one even bothered to ring the bells for the Dowager Queen. The sum of Elizabeth’s memorial was forty shillings paid out in alms by Dorset.
Even if the family were complying with Elizabeth’s request for a humble funeral, their negligence in arranging no Masses for her soul was extraordinary. By the late fourteenth century, the chantry tradition, which had been flourishing by the time of Eleanor of Castile’s death 200 years before, had reached its peak. An increased attention to the doctrine of Purgatory, in which the soul was believed to linger before attaining the purity required to enter Heaven, meant that intercessory prayers and Masses were vital to the safe passage of a loved one’s soul to Paradise. Fifteenth-century religious practice is characterised by this ‘obsessive anxiety’.7 Chantry foundations, essentially small chapels where funds could be willed to support intercessory Masses, were a form of private postmortem insurance for the wealthy. Elizabeth herself had founded a chantry for two priests at her chapel of St Erasmus, Westminster, in the 1470s to pray for the royal family. To leave no such provision was a serious risk; indeed, ‘to make a will without thought for intercessory prayer was near to heresy’.8 Elizabeth’s hope that her meagre possessions might serve ‘for the health of my soul as far as they shall extend’ gestures towards such provision, but given her evident poverty and the extravagant measures taken for most people of rank (47,000 Masses for Queen Eleanor in the first six months after her death, 10,000 for Cardinal Beaufort), it is literally rather damning that her family apparently made no efforts to augment her minimal arrangements.
Henry VII has always had a reputation as a grasping, miserly king, and his treatment of his wife’s family does nothing to dispel it. Elizabeth of York’s sisters, Bridget, Cecily, Anne and Katherine, were entitled by their Mortimer descent to a share of the Mortimer-Clare inheritance, but Henry quietly absorbed those lands into his own estates and did nothing to provide the princesses with dowries. This explains the relatively humble matches made by the daughters of Edward IV, for without dowries, diplomatic foreign matches were out of the question. Bridget gave up and became a nun at Dartmouth Priory, from where she corresponded with her sister for the rest of her life. Katherine married the heir of the Earl of Devon, William Lord Courtenay, and Cecily John, Viscount Welles, half-brother of Margaret Beaufort. For each of these marriages Elizabeth supplied her sisters with allowances of fifty pounds a year and £120-pound annuities for their husbands from her own privy purse. Katherine’s marriage was tainted with scandal — her husband was imprisoned for conspiracy with the Earl of Suffolk — and Elizabeth arranged for the education of her children under Lady Margaret Cotton and provided them with clothes and necessities. When her elderly husband died, Cecily made a love match with a squire, Thomas Kyne of Lincolnshire, which outraged Henry, though he had only himself to blame, and Elizabeth and her motherin-law stepped in to support the couple. Thomas and Cecily lived for some time at Margaret Beaufort’s great country house, Collyweston, near Stamford, but they and their two children were eventually obliged to retreat for economy’s sake to the Isle of Wight, where reportedly their circumstances were less than royal. When Cecily died in 1507, Margaret Beaufort paid for part of her funeral expenses at the abbey of Quarre, which was more than anyone had done for poor Elizabeth Woodville.
Elizabeth of York’s relationship with her ambitious, domineering motherin-law has been described politely as ‘tinged with ambiguity’.9 Publicly, their relationship was cordial — they even went so far as to have identical outfits made up for the Christmas court of 1487 and their award of Garter robes the following year, with a celebratory song composed for the occasion, and rooms were kept for the Queen at Collyweston. Elizabeth’s first daughter, born in 1489, was named Margaret. The two women also worked together, as Eleanor of Castile and Eleanor of Provence had done, to protect Margaret from the perils of an early marriage when her betrothal to King James of Scotland was arranged in 1498. Margaret was just nine, and her grandmother particularly spoke from bitter experience when she expressed her fear that ‘the King of Scots would not wait, but injure her and endanger her health’. Yet it is hard to imagine that a woman as jealous of her son, ambitious and interfering as Margaret Beaufort could have been anything other than an insufferable motherin-law. In 1498, the Spanish ambassador reported the dislike between the two women and the ‘subjection’ the Queen was obliged to tolerate. Elizabeth and Henry apparently had a warm, loving and faithful relationship, but there was no question who was the first woman in the King’s life. There was one interest in which the two women collaborated with apparent enthusiasm, and which, for Elizabeth, was a means of maintaining the traditions of her cultivated, literary-minded mother and her family: the development of printing.
The main figures in the Buckingham rebellion of 1483 had been Buckingham himself, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor, but their supporters were largely drawn from men who had served in Edward IV’s household. Among the 1,100 gentry and merchant figures who petitioned for Richard III’s pardon after the rebellion was the printer William Caxton. It was Elizabeth’s uncle, Anthony, Earl Rivers, who had done more than anything to promote Caxton’s revolutionary printing innovations in England. Caxton’s patron in the Low Countries had been Margaret of Burgundy, Elizabeth’s aunt, and the first-ever printed book in English, the Histories of Troy shows Caxton presenting the text to Margaret in Bruges. The first book to be printed in England itself was Lord Rivers’s translation of a collection of maxims in French and Latin by Jean de Teonville, published as Dictes and sayings of the Philosophers, followed by his translation of Christine de Pisan in 1478 and a book known as the Cordial in 1479.
Elizabeth Woodville was a keen literary patron, purchasing books from, among others, the chancellor of Cambridge University. Her copy of The Romance of the San Graal was passed down to her elder daughter, while Caxton’s History of Jason was dedicated and presented to Prince Edward in 1477 to help him
learn to read. Caxton noted Elizabeth Woodville’s encouragement as ‘the supportacion of our most redobted liege lady’.10 The most intriguing connection with Caxton is his dedication to her of The Knight of the Tower while she was in sanctuary in 1484. In 1483, Margaret Beaufort had requested a copy of a French romance, Blanchardin and Eglantine, from Caxton, a text which remained with her throughout Richard III’s deposition and which she asked Caxton to translate and print in 1489. Since Caxton’s shop was located near Westminster sanctuary, it has been suggested that Lewis Caerleon, the physician used as a go-between by Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville, may have smuggled the book to Elizabeth of York and her mother. The plot of Blanchardin and Eglantine closely mirrors the situation in which the imprisoned Princess found herself in 1483. With her betrothed husband in exile, Elizabeth, like Eglantine, had to remain steadfast in the face of her enemies while her beloved staked his life to fulfil his promise. In this, the transmission of books between royal women, which had always formed part of an informal network of patronage and power, becomes an instrument of female conspiracy in a gesture worthy of courtly romance. By later publicising the book, Margaret Beaufort was able to gloss over Elizabeth’s unfortunate carry-on with her uncle and augment her family’s prestige by guiding readers instead towards a romantic story which had parallels in fresh contemporary memory.
Elizabeth of York was also a customer of Caxton’s (though Margaret, typically, took credit for introducing him to the King), as well as of his successor, Wynkeyn de Worde. Eneydos was dedicated to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Caxton’s final book, The Fifteen Oes, an appropriate selection of prayers from St Bridget of Sweden, was made for Elizabeth and her daughter Margaret. There is thus a connection between Margaret of Scotland’s earliest vernacular commissions and Elizabeth of York’s patronage of the first English printer, placing the patronage of English royal women at the centre of a movement whose impact, during the Renaissance, was to be felt all over the world.
